IGL Trials Database

Innovation plays a pivotal role in fostering economic growth, yet there is a limited understanding of whether it can be taught. I conduct a randomized evaluation of an education program implemented by a state government and a nonprofit organization, providing an opportunity to 6,224 8th-grade students from disadvantaged backgrounds to develop frugal innovations for global and local problems. To assess students’ innovative ability, I created a novel scale with inputs from experienced inventors and used a lab-in-the-field game from experimental economics.

An RCT was used to investigate the effectiveness of an innovation support scheme (ISS) for SMEs in tackling age diversity challenges. The ISS included leadership training aimed at fostering team climate and valuing age diversity, and computer-based cognitive training for employees. Levels of recruitment into the trial, engagement in the interventions and response rates to surveys were lower than anticipated, which have all limited the potential to identify the impacts of the interventions.

Women are underrepresented in patenting and the gap is not closing quickly. One major roadblock to progress is a dearth of causal evidence on the potential effectiveness of policies to reduce the gender gap in patenting. Analyzing a randomized control trial at the United States Patent and Trademark Office that was designed to provide additional help to applicants who do not have legal representation, we find heterogeneous causal impacts across gender and technologies on the probability of obtaining patent rights.

This experiment tries to understand how managers respond to uncertainty when making research and development decisions. Three experiments were conducted with master’s degree students in a program focused on the intersection of business and technology.

We examine the influence of physical proximity on between-startup knowledge spillovers at one of the largest technology co-working hubs in the United States. Relying on the random assignment of office space to the hub's 251 startups, we find that proximity positively influences knowledge spillovers as proxied by the likelihood of adopting an upstream web technology already used by a peer startup.

The main objective of this project is to test the effects of feedback with and without relative ranking scores on SMEs and first-time applicants performance in the funding program “General Programme” of the FFG, and business performance after the program. The feedback for each firm will be based on evaluations scores of the respective funding proposal from project evaluators in the FFG. The participants in the RCT are all Start-ups, SMEs, and large companies who are first-time applicants accepted into the funding program in the timespan of a year.

Many Start Ups and Small & Medium Enterprises (SME) have an immature methodological approach to innovation and half of them present a clear deficit in innovation know-how, pointing towards a need for extra support. The efficacy of two approaches to building knowledge and increasing awareness of non-technical innovation among Start Ups and Small and Medium Enterprises (SME) will be tested.

This paper investigates the role of information sharing among experts as the driver of evaluation decisions.

Cavendish Enterprise's Business Boost trial project involved providing young small firms - typically micro-businesses - with a treatment involving a series of workshops designed to enhance productivity. This was provided largely as a top-up to an advice and mentoring programme called 'Start and Grow'. The project was part of the government's Business Basics Programme which has the core aim of identifying cost effective, yet productivity enhancing, programmes of business support for SMEs which can be run at scale throughout the country.

Individual-level opportunity recognition processes are vital to corporate entrepreneurship. However, little is known regarding how managerial communication impacts the effectiveness of idea suggestion systems in stimulating individuals' participation in intrapreneurial ideation. Integrating self-determination theory, creativity, and framing research, we theorize how different ways of inviting employees to submit proposals (opt-out/opt-in registration; provision of examples) affect the number and quality of submitted ideas.

In 2004 and 2005, the then Ministry of Economic Affairs issued innovation vouchers to SMEs to promote cooperation and knowledge exchange between companies and knowledge institutes in the field of innovation. The underlying idea was that more new products, services and/or processes can be developed with more knowledge exchange. This innovation can in turn lead to an increase in turnover and productivity, which ultimately leads to more prosperity.

We design two laboratory experiments to analyze the causal effects of competition on step-by-step innovation. Innovations result from costly R&D investments and move technology up one step. Competition is inversely measured by the ex post rents for firms that operate at the same technological level, that is, for neck-and-neck firms. First, we find that increased competition leads to a significant increase in R&D investments by neck-and-neck firms.

Existing theories and empirical research on how innovation occurs largely assume that innovativeness is an inherent characteristic of the individual and that people with this innate ability select into jobs that require it. In this paper, we investigate whether people who do not self-select into being innovators can be induced to innovate, and whether they innovate differently than those who do self-select into innovating.